keys to producing high-quality translations

In Translation and the Language(s) of Medicine: Keys to producing a successful German-English Translation, which first appeared in The Write Stuff, the journal of the European Medical Writers Association (EMWA) in 2006, I take a brief look at the role of medical writing and translation in Ancient Greece and Rome, the imprints the Greek, Latin, and various vernacular tongues have left on the language(s) of medicine, and the idiosyncracies of medical terminology [1].

translators must be "very sensitive not only to what is written but also to what is implied"

However, translation requires more than exchanging terms in one language for terms of another. Language is closely tied to both subject-matter knowledge and culture. Therefore, to convey content correctly and unambiguously, translators must be well-versed in the subject matter they are addressing. Likewise, to be able to grasp what the source-language author intends to say and the target-language recipient needs to hear, the translator must have an intimate understanding of both the source and the target cultures. In this sense, every translation is a sort of interpretation.

sigmund freud's writings in english—example of a "seriously defective" translation

An impressive example of how a lack of subject-matter or cultural understanding can distort what an author intended to convey is the English translation of the writings of Sigmund Freud.

Bruno Bettelheim, in his book entitled Freud and Man’s Soul, argues that “the English translations of Freud’s writings are seriously defective” [2] and have led to misperceptions about both Freud and psychoanalysis.

Because of the translators’ preference for medical and learned terms over the common-speech words Freud had used, psychoanalysis came to be perceived, in the United States, as a medical specialty instead of the humanistic undertaking that Freud had had in mind.

freud and man's soul

Freud’s greatest concern was with man’s inner being, to which he referred to as the ‘soul’ (Seele, from ‘psyche’

[gr.]). The purpose of his writings was to make his readers understand themselves so they could act more rationally. Language was an essential aspect of Freud’s work. He tried to communicate his concepts in words which his readers had used since their childhood, and he avoided technical and Græco-Latin terms whenever possible. By contrast, Freud's translators, Bettelheim contends, tended to replace words in ordinary use with medical terms and borrowings from Greek and Latin.

A particularly striking example is the way two of Freud’s most important concepts were translated into English. Freud divided the soul into the conscious, the preconscious, and the unconscious. To name these concepts, he selected words used by every German-speaking child: To refer to the conscious aspects of the mind, he chose the personal pronoun Ich (‘I’), and to refer to the unconscious, he chose the pronoun Es (‘it’). These personal pronouns were translated into English using their Latin equivalents—the ‘ego’ and the ‘id’, turning them into impersonal and technical speech. No word has more intimate connotations than the pronoun ‘I’. In contrast, ‘ego’ has the connotation of selfishness, such as in ‘ego trip,’ which was not what Freud had in mind.

A major shortcoming of the English translations is that they eliminate any mention of the ‘soul’, which is substituted with ‘mind’ throughout. As we have seen, for Freud the mind (Ich, or ‘I’) was only one of three aspects of our soul, the other two being the preconscious (Über-ich, or ‘above-I’) and the unconscious (Es, or ‘it’). Therefore, what Freud referred to as the soul, the translators reduced entirely to the conscious aspect of the mind, the ‘I’.

freud'sche fehlleistung

Freud describes a number of errors we sometimes make in everyday life when our unconscious plays tricks on us, and he calls these Fehlleistungen. This term combines two well-known German nouns: Leistung means accomplishment, and Fehl- indicates failure. Thus, the word Fehlleistung combines an achievement and a mistake. For example, when we produce a Freudian slip of the tongue, we might feel that we said what we wanted to say, but we also know it was the wrong thing to say. One possible rendering of Fehlleistung, Bettelheim suggests, is ‘faulty achievement.’ In the English translation, however, Fehlleistung is translated as ‘parapraxis,’ a word drawn from Greek. In German, we might readily admit that we just committed or witnessed a Fehlleistung. The word ‘parapraxis,’ however, sounds like something that is far removed from our own personal experience.

freuds schaulust

What Freud referred to as Schaulust—a pleasure in watching something—may be difficult to translate, but a phrase such as ‘lust in looking’ would make his meaning clear. The word used by Freud’s translators, ‘scopophilia,’ does not.

in translation, freud's psychoanalysis becomes something that analyzes the unconscious of another person, but not our own

Overall, the English translation of Freud changed his message in significant ways. By making ample use of abstraction, it allows readers to distance themselves from what Freud intended to convey. Psychoanalysis becomes, in translation, something that analyzes the unconscious of another person, but not our own. As a result, in the United States, the main task of psychoanalysis is to cure mental illness, and psychoanalysis is considered the prerogative of physicians. However, Freud, himself a physician, considered psychoanalysis a part of psychology. Freud’s goal for his readers was a reasonable dominance of our conscious over our unconscious. The prime requirement for living well, according to Freud, is to control our inner conflicts and to love and be loved, and not—as many have erroneously assumed—to enable our ‘ego’ to build a more satisfying life for itself.

Bruno Bettelheim aptly sums up the translator’s responsibility [2]:

“Translators need to be very sensitive not only to what is written but also to what is implied. Their task very definitely includes an obligation to try to transmit not just the words forming a sentence but also the meanings to which these words allude.”

references

1. Berghammer G. Translation and the Language(s) of Medicine: Keys to Producing a Successful German-English Translation. The Write Stuff 2006;2:40–44.

2. Bettelheim B. Freud And Man's Soul. New York: Random House, Inc.; 1982.